RESEARCH & RESOURCES

Commentary by Will Ortiz, IT Director, Atlantic Detroit Diesel-Allison

Looking at revenue growth opportunities, Atlantic Detroit Diesel-Allison, a leading Eastern U.S. distributor and service provider of engines, automatic transmissions, and parts, put a corporate initiative in place to empower its service department to process more orders, drive more revenue, and increase customer satisfaction.

Real-Time Information Is Key

To achieve these objectives, Atlantic DDA had to make real-time information available to service representatives so they could improve efficiency and relay the most up-to-date information to customers (e.g., when customers could expect to receive the equipment they have in for repair). In addition, having access to real-time information would enable up-to-date operational reporting and support current information in Web applications.

The Challenge

Making real-time information available proved to be a long-time challenge for Atlantic DDA. It would have required integrating and synchronizing heterogeneous data between the company’s iSeries system and Oracle-based BI and Portal applications.

The Right Criteria

Atlantic DDA evaluated different replication solutions, looking for one that could meet its demanding time-to-market and budget requirements. Specifically, the replication solution needed to have low impact on the source iSeries system and support the heterogeneous environment. The change data capture (CDC) technology also had to enable processing data changes in real time and on a continuous basis, which would put an end to the daily full bulk load integration the company had previously been tackling. In turn, the technology must help alleviate this time-consuming process and the strain on financial and labor resources. Finally, the solution would need to pass a “stress test,” which included throughput measurements handling thousands of tables and more than a terabyte of data.

"In addition to doubling our revenues with the ODR solution, we’ve also been pleased to improve our reporting to support business operations." —Will Ortiz, IT Director, Atlantic Detroit Diesel-Allison

Solution: ODR with CDC Technology for DB2/400

Atlantic DDA selected Attunity’s Operational Data Replication (ODR) solution, which employs log-based CDC technology that monitors their DB2/400 database journals and captures only the changes made to the required tables. By using log-based CDC technology and offloading the changes as soon as they are captured, the ODR solution accomplishes minimal impact while simultaneously scaling to meet the high throughput of changes in near real time. Atlantic DDA determined that the results garnered with the solution, combined with its price performance, made it the right choice.

Bottom-Line Benefits

The real-time information made available by the ODR solution delivered quick and tangible benefits. Atlantic DDA is now able to realize significant savings in cost and time, and reap the results from overall increases in process efficiencies.

The specific bottom-line benefits that please the company most include:

Enabling the service department to double its order processing capabilities

Doubling the revenue associated with increased repair orders

Improved reporting and business intelligence for optimal operational efficiencies

Increased customer satisfaction through improved responsiveness

For a free white paper on this topic from Attunity, click here and choose the title “Efficient and Real-Time Data Integration with Change Data Capture.” For more free white papers, click here.